


Notebooks with words

by keysmash



Series: Supernatural s5 Codas [18]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-19
Updated: 2010-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-06 12:05:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keysmash/pseuds/keysmash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I chose to do something with my life<br/>that I knew I could fail at.<br/>I spent my whole life walking<br/>and hid such colorful wings.</p><p>from Brian Tromboli's "<a href="http://community.livejournal.com/literaryquotes/7059876.html">Things my Son Should Know After I've Died</a>"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notebooks with words

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the [Bobby's house](http://latentfunction.livejournal.com/tag/fic:+spn:+spn_30snapshots:+bobby%27s+house) arc of my [](http://community.livejournal.com/spn_30snapshots/profile)[**spn_30snapshots**](http://community.livejournal.com/spn_30snapshots/) [table](http://latentfunction.livejournal.com/349450.html), which deals with spoilers for 510. Follows [What does it matter when or who](http://latentfunction.livejournal.com/377863.html). Title from Brian Tromboli.

Dean's back didn't _hurt_ so much as it got annoying after a day of sitting in the same position for hours at a time. What he needed was a chance to stretch it out, maybe a little bit of digging, but since they'd been stuck inside, without anything heavier to move than an occasional load of books, he'd stiffened up instead of getting loose. He stretched when he got the chance, trying to find an excuse to move around every hour or so, but the first time Bobby and Sam both left the room, Dean snatched up Sam's laptop and stretch out, face-down, on the couch with it. They usually charged the computers in shifts, so that one was always ready to use, and right now, Dean's was the one upstairs, plugged into the wall.

He squirmed a little once he got settled, grateful for the relief of a new position, and didn't even care that Sam shot him an amused look when he came back into the room. Sam hadn't been using the laptop, anyway, and Dean set it up on the cushion at the end of the couch, so that the back of the screen bumped up against the sofa's arm. He called up a few of the translation websites he trusted the most, just to be able to double check his own work as he went, then grabbed the book he'd been using and his pad of notes, and got back to work. Lying like this would only fuck his back up more if he didn't move in an hour or so, but it was damn nice for now.

Sam trailed his fingers over the back of Dean's neck when he passed him, heading to his own chair, and Dean shivered as he started on the next chapter. It was dull stuff, dealing with astronomy before people knew what rotated around what, and written in Middle English to boot. Dean mouthed along as he read, going so far as to mutter some of the trickier words, and scribbled notes for anything that seemed relevant.

Not much of it seemed relevant. Even jotting down things that had only the slightest chance of helping them, Dean hadn't pulled more than half a page of notes from the half of the book he'd read so far. The other texts he'd gone through, over the past few days, had been the same way. Worse, Bobby shot down everything he found as useless. Sam and Bobby hadn't done any better, but it was hard going.

They couldn't keep doing this forever. Even Bobby had a limited number of books, a limited number of contacts to feed him more intel, and eventually they'd be out of all options except for the one the bad guys were gunning for. Sam said Lucifer threatened to bring him back to life if he killed himself, and Dean knew they could do it. It meant he couldn't even put a gun in Sam's mouth and then his own if things got bad enough.

If Bobby's billions of pages didn't cough up an answer, they were pretty much down to running. They were pretty much down to fucked.

On the other side of the room, Sam sighed and kicked his feet up onto the table. Dean glanced over and saw him rub the bridge of his nose.

"Take a break," Dean said. "You're making me tired."

"Just took one," Sam said. "Helped Bobby haul stuff around."

Dean snorted. "Doesn't count."

"Got me outta here for a while," Sam said, and then sighed as he looked around the room.

"Here, what're you working on?"

Sam shrugged and held up his book, which actually looked to be a collection of photocopies held together with a huge black binder-clip. "Early Christian apocrypha. Someone's already translated it but it doesn't make much sense."

"What's the original in?"

"Latin. And it's someone copying a copy of a copy, so I don't even know if the translation itself is off or it's the transcription that was bad." He ran a hand through his hair and dropped the papers into his lap.

Dean glanced through his own notes one more time, then closed the legal pad inside his book and held the whole thing out to Sam. "Let's switch. I'm sick of this, too."

Sam handed the papers over without even asking what Dean had been working on. "Aww, you had this?" he asked after opening the book. "I thought I'd already gotten all the Middle English ones myself."

"Yeah, I noticed." Dean shook his head; Sam hadn't exactly been subtle about going for the books he wanted. "Not my fault your Latin's awful."

"Actually it is, seeing as how you're the one that taught me Latin." Sam frowned then, like he just realized he'd admitted to sucking. "And it's not that bad."

Dean snorted. "When you're reciting, okay, it's fine. When you're reading, though — sucks."

"In that case." Sam leaned over to take his computer back. He put it on the table, just beyond Dean's reach, and then didn't even use it right away. Dean rolled his eyes and tried to catch up on the papers Sam had used.

"You're gonna mess your back up in new and different ways if you don't move," Sam said, later. Dean had worked through almost three pages of the text — which was just as bad as Sam made it out to be, with wacky symbolism on top of the sloppy transcription — and he rolled his eyes.

"Okay, whatever," Sam said. He leaned forward and typed something before sitting back and scribbling on his notes.

Dean gave it a few more minutes, then sat up and leaned against the back of the couch. He kicked his feet up onto the table, and by the time Bobby joined them again, phone cradled between his shoulder and his ear as he rolled, Sam had joined him, propping his feet up as well and knocking the toes of their boots together.


End file.
